Inside Facebook

Facebook released some new stats on mobile usage tonight:

• In the first 24 hours after status commenting was released on Facebook’s standard mobile website, users made over 1 million status comments.
• The number of “active users” (which Facebook normally defines to be active in the last 90 days) of Facebook mobile services has grown from 5 million at the beginning of this year to 15 million today

Facebook’s Wayne Chang, however, did not break out the status comments or active users by country. It would not be surprising if a large portion of the comments originated in Latin America and Europe, where Facebook has been experiencing explosive international growth this year.

Today, Facebook operates multiple mobile services worldwide. Here’s a quick rundown:

• m.facebook.com, the standard interface that will work with almost any mobile phone browser in the world
• x.facebook.com, an advanced mobile interface
• Facebook SMS, through which users can update their status and receive notifications
• Facebook for iPhone, one the most popular apps in the App Store
• Facebook for Blackberry, which currently has over 1.8 million active users

Facebook Platform for Mobile was announced in October 2007, but developers who have tried the mobile platform still have some concerns with the user experience.

Purchase this report The Facebook Marketing Bible - November 2008 Edition Buy PDF: $39 USD OR Buy PDF + 3 Months of Free Updates: $49 USD

The newly revised, expanded, and hot-off-the-press Facebook Marketing Bible: 39+ Ways to Market Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook - November 2008 Edition is now available!

The Facebook Marketing Bible has been purchased by hundreds of agencies, marketers, social application developers, entrepreneurs, and educators, and is the leading resource on Facebook marketing today.

The densely-packed Facebook Marketing Bible contains three detailed sections: Tools for Guerilla Marketers, Tools for Advertisers, and Tools for Application Developers. Each part outlines the best available channels and strategies for reaching your audience inside Facebook. Please see the full table of contents below.

The November 2008 edition includes updates on the following topics:

• Details on the latest Facebook advertising opportunities, placements, and ad formats. With the Facebook redesign, Facebook launched new advertising units on the home page, which can be filled with a variety of ad units that are deeply integrated into Facebook features like events, pages, and virtual gifts. Find out how you can make the most of your Facebook ad dollars with details on every ad unit available inside Facebook.
• Updates on Facebook’s virtual gifts store. Last week, Facebook signaled updates to the way it’s thinking about virtual gifts and the role they play in the future of Facebook. Get all the latest details here.
• The latest aggressive marketing practices in Facebook’s viral channels being used by application developers. Affiliate marketers spamming application users with links to landing pages are sure to be shut down, but app developers adding new “action links” are likely to see more engagement.
• Fully updated for the Facebook redesign. With the Facebook redesign now fully complete, new opportunities are available for marketers who want to optimize their campaigns for the latest Facebook updates. Get the absolute latest and most detailed analysis of all the recent changes.
• Plus, updates on Facebook Connect, Beacon, and more.

For those interested in learning more, click the purchase link above. The price is $39, or $49 with three months of free updates emailed directly to your inbox. As always, please make suggestions if you’d like to see more attention paid to any topic!

Table of Contents

Introduction

I. Tools for Guerilla Marketers

1. Profile Page

2. Groups

• Strategy: What about spamming existing groups?
• SEO
  

3. Pages

• Strategy: Groups and Pages are very similar. Which makes more sense?
• Strategy: I’ve just created a Page. How do I promote it?
• Group to Page Migration
• Guidelines for Promoting Pages Outside Facebook
• Official vs Unofficial Pages
• Ways Page Owners Can Restrict Content for Underage Users
  
• More Features Coming Soon

4. Events

• Events API
• Events SEO
  

5. Notes and Photos

6. Messages

7. Marketplace

8. Share / Posted Items

9. Mini Feed and News Feed

10. Feed Importing

> Data: Tracking Facebook’s International Growth by Country

> Data: Latest US Facebook Age and Gender Demographics

> Recommended Strategies for Guerilla Marketers

II. Tools for Advertisers

11. Social Ads

• Summary of ad units available to Facebook advertisers
  1. Sponsorship Units on the New Facebook Home Page
     • Social Video Ads
     • Sponsored Virtual Gifts
     • Events Ads
     • Pages Ads
       
  2. Advertising in the New Facebook News Feed
  3. Advertising on the Profile Page (and other pages)
     

12. Virtual Gifts

• The Future of Virtual Gifts on Facebook

13. Localization Opportunities

14. Integrated Opportunities

15. Beacon

16. Polls

17. Facebook Platform Ad Networks

• List of Leading Facebook Platform Ad Networks
• What eCPMs do apps charge? Data from Facebook application developers

18. Facebook Platform Application Sponsorships

• List of Leading Facebook Platform Sponsorship Resellers/Rep Firms
• Strategy: Why sponsor applications when I can sponsor Facebook itself?

19. Sponsored Facebook Groups

> Recommended Strategies for Advertisers

III. Tools for Application Developers

20. Profile Box

• Strategy: Where do most new application users come from?
• 5 Things Developers May Not Know About the Facebook Redesign
• Profile Integration: Tour of New Facebook App Settings

21. Application Tabs

22. Application Info Sections

23. Designing Feed Stories

• Strategy: Designing High Performance Feed Items
• News Feed Optimization: Strategies and Techniques

24. Feeds 2.0

• Feed Forms
• Feed Clustering
• Action Links
  

25. Feed Publisher

• Publishing in the Feed with Feed Comments

26. Requests / Invitations

• Policy Updates: Requiring Invites to Access Hidden Features, Offering Incentives for Invites, Ads on Profile Page Prohibited
• Strategy: Facebook’s Evolving Approach to Platform Governance

27. Facebook Notifications

• Chat Integration: Facebook Wants More Synchronous Notifications
• Policy Update: Bulk Pre-Selection Prohibited
• Spammy Affiliate Marketers Sure to be Shut Down
  

28. Email Notifications

• Updates: Email’s Status as Core Application Marketing Channel in Doubt

29. Application Bookmarks

30. Application Directory

31. Status Update Source

32. Demographic Restrictions

33. Verification and Certification

• Great Apps Program
• Application Verification

34. Translations

• Data: Stats on Facebook Apps Built for International Markets
• Tutorial: Translating Your Applications Using Facebook’s Crowd-sourced Translation Service

35. Facebook Connect

• Overview: Integrating Facebook Connect with Your Website
• Related: Google Friend Connect

Purchase this report The Facebook Marketing Bible - November 2008 Edition Buy PDF: $39 USD OR Buy PDF + 3 Months of Free Updates: $49 USD

36. Analytics Tools

• List of Leading Third-Party Facebook Platform Analytics Providers
• New Metrics for Developers with Facebook Profile Redesign

37. Search Engine Optimization

38. Mobile

• Facebook for iPhone and Connect for iPhone

39. Customer Service

> Poll: Which viral channels do Facebook users hate most about apps?

> Recommended Strategies for Application Developers

Conclusion

Facebook tonight launched version 2.0 of its Facebook for iPhone application, bringing many features that were before only available on the site to a mobile device for the first time.

With version 2.0:

• The home page now features a full News Feed, along with access to filtered views of the News Feed, like Status Updates, Posted Items, Live Feed, and Events.
• Full photo tagging and posting is now supported.
• Notifications are now accessible for the first time.
• Profiles now have tabs, like the Facebook website redesign.
• Feed comments are accessible both here and on the News Feed.

Overall, Facebook for iPhone now looks and feels like a fully featured Facebook - it’s a remarkably well designed product.

Facebook’s Joe Hewitt, the lead developer of the iPhone application, said shortly after the release tonight, “I’ve been hearing some bug reports in 2.0, so I will probably wind up doing a 2.1 release in the short term to address many of these problems. Please tell me if you find anything wrong (in the comments here, or you can message me), and I will try to fix it.”

Facebook for iPhone can be downloaded by heading to the App Store on your iPhone.

Facebook today released a preview of version 2.0 of Facebook iPhone application. The upshot? Both the home page and profile page in Facebook for iPhone will look and feel a lot more similar to the redesigned Facebook home page and profile page.

Still not included in any of the Facebook for iPhone mocks are ads. With iPhone rapidly gaining share in the mobile web market, we wouldn’t be surprised to see Facebook include ads in its mobile products in the next year - particularly to take advantage of the iPhone’s GPS data. Mobile ad network AdMob is giving away $1 million to iPhone developers, so it’s clear that the market is developing quickly.

Home - The home page will have a full News Feed, along with access to filtered views of the News Feed, like Status Updates, Posted Items, and Events.

Notifications - Notifications are now available. When it’s available, Facebook for iPhone will take advantage of Apple’s new “push” service, which will allow Facebook to push notification alerts to your phone when you’re not using the Facebook iPhone app.

Profiles - Profiles now have tabs, like the Facebook website redesign. Feed comments are accessible both here and on the home page.

Find more on the Facebook for iPhone application page.

Today at f8, Ben Ling announced that Facebook Connect will be launching Facebook Connect for iPhone this fall. While an official launch date was not announced, Ling said the service will be built as a Cocoa framework.

Facebook Connect for iPhone marks the first time Facebook is extending the Facebook Platform to mobile devices. Application developers have been clamoring for more ways of reaching users of Facebook’s mobile services. Most of Facebook’s recent mobile efforts have focused on the iPhone - after launching an iPhone specific mobile website a year ago, Facebook launched an iPhone application a couple of weeks ago. It has since updated the Facebook for iPhone app with more features.

Facebook has taken a lot of user feedback into account regarding their initial launch of the Facebook for iPhone application 1 week ago and released version 1.1 today.  New features include:

• writing on friends’ walls
• viewing friends’ photo albums
• view friends’ full profiles
• tagging photos (hold your finder down on the photo)
• uploading pictures from your library

To upgrade, just head to the App Store on your iPhone!

The Facebook Platform for Mobile has been around for some time, but many users and developers are barely aware of it. Ultimately, however, the limiting factors of mobile platform adoption are not lack of awareness or lack of functionality. Two other key reasons are more limiting:

• First-time users have to jump through a number of hoops before being able to engage with mobile apps
• The near-crippling of application SMS integration through a less-than-friendly permission granting system.

This unfortunately means that the Facebook Mobile Platform economy is struggling to grow. Most developers have not yet taken the time to build a mobile interface for their apps. The perception of lack of interest from Facebook doesn’t help, as is takes a long time for bugs in the mobile platform to be addressed (e.g. here). As a result, most mobile profile pages lack any applications.

Sign-On Issues

First, to get the mobile-only experience, users may need to remember to go to m.facebook.com (the mobile version of www.facebook.com). The www.facebook.com site will often serve the full version of the page instead of redirecting users correctly; that’s definitely less than ideal on a small interface and limited bandwidth. Facebook also recently started requiring JavaScript to log in, which turns more users away.

SMS Limitations

Facebook Mobile provides extensive text messaging functionality that applications can make use of (yes: you can build a Facebook application to send and receive text messages, for free), but this is the part where the user experience can be quite awful. First the user needs to enable their phone for SMS which, if all goes well, is no mean feat in itself.

The issue is complicated by the apparent limitation to specific carriers, especially depending on territory: the sum total in the UK is one (the o2 network). But, despite the off-putting lack of my provider in the drop-down, I entered my non-o2 mobile number and everything worked fine. I don’t know whether this is the case on all networks, but it’s worth a try.

Should an application wish to use SMS facilities in the API, the user needs to perform additional steps to enable mobile functionality on an application by application basis. This is certainly off-putting to the user, especially given the dead-end user journey that Facebook provides. It’s not incredibly difficult, but it’s one more point where users can drop off.

Looking Forward

Once you’re in, the functionality that Facebook provides within the mobile home page is quite good: it’s quick to use and has some core features (including status updates, pokes and messages). It’s also easy to use on a small screen.

Obviously not all applications are well suited for mobile, but plenty are. Gifting, poking, and all the basic friend interactions can be implemented easily. Whether we’ll see more complex mobile-specific applications growing or not will depend as much on how users start to really engage with the mobile web as it will on the growth in social networking.

The real pull for developers to work with mobile, though, would be to launch a micropayment system that doesn’t require the user to install anything, buy credit, or otherwise have to think about whether they will or won’t be using this particular piece of technology. Mobile technology is ready for this and a reverse-billing system with seamless application integration would surely be a revenue-generator for developers, Facebook, and the service provider.

The functionality offered by Facebook mobile is quite extensive, but country and network provider limitations and the poor user sign-on experience are big barriers. Until Facebook views mobile, and especially SMS, as an integral part of the Platform, user adoption is always going to be limited.